http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1796

We’ve talked before about emotions being contagious. Well, here’s a study that was done at the University of Chicago about social networks  that discovered that lonely people actually spread that loneliness to others around them – friends, neighbors, anyone they come into contact with. The most interesting thing about this study for me is that they talk about the mechanism for the spread – they reference a gradual ‘fraying’ at the edges of society. They also showed that this phenomenon was more pronounced among friends than family, and for women than for men. None of this surprised me but I was thrilled to see a little of the ‘how’ come to light. I wonder if there are other good studies about emotional contagion out there? Anyone know of any?

Here’s a posting from the ‘Race to Nowhere’ Facebook site today:

“This week I was struck by a comment at a faculty in-service day recognizing the packed schedule left little time for reflection and processing. This is our kids experience every day, and they come home to more work. Do our young people have adequate time to process what they are learning each day?”

Yes!! Such a relevant point. Adding a portion of time in any cycle, (even life?), for reflection and processing is SO important. This is a recurring theme in Six Seconds trainings, especially the courses where the cycle of change is the main focus. How do we make change or forward progress if we don’t build in the time to process our previous experiences? How can we ask our kids to keep going and make good choices and judgments without this same reflective period? In what ways are we selling ourselves short by not valuing that portion of the process?



Make Magazine has an interesting piece on emotionally interacting with a digitally created piece of art in their January 2010 issue. The two links below are the creator’s own website showing the ‘creature’ and then the link to the Make Magazine blurb titled ‘Emotional Aquatics’. The article goes into a little bit of depth about how the interactive process actually works – namely a person comes to observe the piece, the ‘creature’ detects that someone is watching and has one of two reactions – ‘shy but playfully curious, or totally terrified.’ Apparently the viewers tend to favor the more dramatic, terrified response!

http://www.eyalohana.com/axolotl/

http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol21/?pg=23

Anyway, there are some fascinating things happening here. The article describes the piece as inspired by Julio Cortazar’s short story about a “man’s emotional obsession with aquarium life.” I’m not sure, exactly, if what is happening here in this setting is really based on emotions, although it certainly makes sense that the story would inspire this piece. Clearly, artificial beings elicit an emotional response in us as we interact with them, but as the technology becomes increasingly more sophisticated, what happens when our emotional state begins to influence them? For example, our car may be a computer and may elicit an emotional response in us, but isn’t trying to manipulate us (advertising aside, of course!) Isn’t an artificial creature ‘emotionally’ responding to us always going to be entirely contrived? Do we need artificial emotional intelligence?

I’m curious what others think…

This was an interesting little personal expedition for me. Here is a site that chose 40 photographs depicting a range of emotions.

http://tinyurl.com/cr3p2x

I just scrolled though them and had several distinct reactions. First off, I felt the pictures were a little contrived. They’re all beautiful photographs designed to elicit reactions. However, I noticed about halfway through the set that my heart rate was elevated and I was breathing kind of quickly – even anticipating what might come next. It was as though my body had taken over from my mind and had something to say about what it was seeing. It was powerful that even when I was feeling skeptical in my mind, I still had an intense reaction in my body!

The other thought I had while looking these over was about the importance of context. Similar to the exercise where you look at a picture of a face, think you grasp the emotion there, and then see successive pictures zooming out that give you more of the story, these pictures demonstrate that  context changes everything. The lesson here isn’t that there’s one correct interpretation of emotion, or that if we have enough information about the situation we will all come to agreement on the emotion, but rather that we will always all see and feel different things even in the same situation.  There’s no right answer to what an emotion is, just our answer.  And our ability to recognize that and describe that feeling to ourselves in order to harness it’s power.

I hope there’s some talk out there about the film ‘Race to Nowhere’ that’s currently traveling around the country. In the interest of getting the word out, here are my impressions. If you’re not familiar with the movie, director Vicki Abeles has made a film about education in the U.S. and the myriad of ways that the system is failing to prepare and provide for our kids. It’s not a particularly uplifting film unless you’re an optimist, (which, thankfully, I happen to be!), but it does have a substantial amount of useful information, not the least of which are the thoughts and feelings of the students themselves.

Here’s the link to the website. The trailer is on the site and on youtube, too.

http://www.racetonowhere.com/

Regardless of how you feel about education in the U.S., the film brings up some almost irrefutable issues that we need to think about as a nation and decide whether they matter to us or not. The ways our children are hurting as a result of their journey through K-12 education are almost entirely social and emotional, with some significant physical stresses heaped in there, too. The issue isn’t necessarily that they can’t finish high school or go to college, it’s also about what state of mind and body they’re in when they get there and how they feel about themselves along the way. It’s a question, really, of community values. Do we value our children or do we value their successes?

Daily I encounter the question of what it takes to enact change in our schools. Why is there such a difference between what we know and what we do? We know a lot of what we put our kids through isn’t good for them. Why don’t we choose a different path? The most common answer to this question seems to be fear. Fear that our children will miss out on some future opportunity if we don’t push them hard enough to keep every available door open for them. I do agree that fear is a huge factor. However, how about the fact that we don’t know for sure that doing something different will really work? All we know right now is that what we’re doing isn’t going so well. What if we showed successes in the schools that are trying different things? What if we showed what these kids look like as successful adults? At 25? At 45? Put the evidence out there for everyone see that it really does work, that we really can produce happy, productive and successful adults without using a high pressure, cookie cutter method that defines a narrow version of success.

Why is this so complex? Why is there such a difference between what we know and what we do?

The stakes in keeping the system the same are often high, including the economic stakes of educational testing companies, colleges, and private tutors. There are also significant socioeconomic factors at play. There is also a legitimate lack of knowledge by parents, educators and policy makers about current research around how kids learn and how their brains work. There are legitimate differences in what we collectively view as success. I’m sure we can all think of many more reasons to be resistant to change.

I would argue that although all those obstacles exist, the most relevant question to ask here is, “What will happen if we do nothing?” To enact change will take either slow and steady progressive decision making or an all-out revolt. I think Abeles is hoping for the revolt and honestly, so am I.

On a fortunate side note, Abeles ultimately ends up highlighting extraordinarily well some of the things that go right in the system – great teachers, homework that is relevant but not crushing, engaged families and several more, by contrasting with the negatives. What truly shines are the indomitable spirits of the kids she talks to in the film.

Abeles is clearly able convey that the responsibility for asking hard questions lays with all of us. A series of suggestions and relevant points at the end of the film targets specific groups one at a time – administrators, teachers, parents, students – aimed at engaging them in their share of the effort.

After the screening, the most common questions audience members had all involved one word. How. “How do I…?” “How do we get other people to…?” “How do we effect change?” “What can I do tomorrow or next week?” I think it’s time we worked hard to answer the ‘how’ questions and help people to see that they themselves are the actual tool for change.

From Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang from USC. Literally, she means embodied – the two are not able to be separated. Here’s three more:

“Emotions are not add ons that interfere with cognition.”

“The message from social and affective neuroscience is clear: no longer can we think of learning as separate from or disrupted by emotion, and no longer can we focus only at the level of the individual student in analyzing good strategies for classroom instruction.”

“…help educators move beyond the oversimplified “neuromyths” that have abounded in education (Goswami, 2004, 2006), replacing these with a set of strategies for fostering the sound development of academic emotions (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry 2002) through the use of emotionally relevant and socially contextualized educational practices (Brackett, Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006). “

Academic emotions. What a key concept ripe with possibilities! I don’t have fully formed reactions to this yet but what a great area to spend more time on. Can’t resist mentioning too that it feels significant to me that words and language are being used here as a tool to reframe this discussion. Simply describing the phenomenon, combining the words ‘academic’ and ‘emotions’, helps paint a picture of the combination of two disciplines which is very powerful.

I included her link here the other day but here it is again. This page links to her publication page.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~immordin/

At the conference yesterday, Dr. Josh Aronson from NYU gave a fantastic talk about what he and his colleagues call ’stereotype threat.’ Essentially, stereotype threat is anxiety caused by any sort of stereotype or worry which in turn causes your ‘intelligence’ level to drop. His lab has studied many, many different versions of this and he has quite a few compelling examples of how and when this process occurs, from GRE tests and AP calculus tests to short term memory tests for older folks. In particular, his lab focuses on race and the work is quite moving. His website is below and I would encourage you to take a look if this is something you are interested in.

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Joshua_Aronson

One particularly interesting side note of his talk is what he describes as the social nature of intelligence. He said, “We are as many people as we have social contacts.” By this he means, of course, that our interaction with each person we encounter in our life is unique and makes us a particular version of ourselves for the duration of that interaction, dependent on the biological feedback mechanism that occurs in their presence. We can’t simply separate our social selves from our biological selves. Why are we so articulate when we are in the presence of some people and why are we so tongue-tied with others? Why does that relationship often persist, even when we work to change it? In some part, it is because of this ’stereotype threat’ (not always a true stereotype of course, just that we understand we are being perceived in a particular way) which has a physiological basis for impairing or strengthening our abilities, including our conversational abilities.

Dr. Aronson does talk a little bit about mitigating this influence. It turns out that just giving people the knowledge that it is happening has a positive effect and helps to improve performance, whatever that means in a given situation. I wonder a lot about social and emotional intelligence and how strengthening those skills could perhaps help to mitigate the effects, or at least allow us to perform the way we want to in a social context. It would be fascinating to spend more time on this in the educational arena, especially around testing. Can we minimize the impact of the stereotype threat that lowers test scores by employing emotional intelligence? If so, this would be one more compelling reason to promote the development of these skills in as many children as we can as often as possible.

Okay, so I have to admit I had a real ‘aha’ moment today at the Learning and the Brain Conference. To some it may seem like a ‘duh’ moment instead ( I won’t fault you at all for thinking that!) but to me this represented a real shift in my thinking about SEL skills and how we teach them to kids. Here goes:

I was listening to Linda Lantieri, Director of The Inner Resilience Program and part of CASEL, speak about what it looks like, in real and practical ways, to put social and emotional skill acquisition into schools. She started talking about directly teaching SEL skills. I had my initial reaction to this which I always have which goes something like this, “Okay, okay, yes sometimes there’s no other way to teach it but come on, really? Is that how we really want to do it? Wouldn’t we rather strive to have SEL modeled all throughout our school or workplace? Make it something we don’t talk about, something we just alwasys do?”

And then it hit me. Wow! Of course there are very good reasons to teach the skills overtly. The first and foremost one is that it gets us all to TALK about them! What they are, why they are iimportant. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, it gives us a chance to PRACTICE them. This, too, is key! How can we expect anyone, I don’t care if you’re an adult or a child, to use these skills in the real world when the going gets tough and things get dicey if we haven’t practiced them in better, more ideal conditions? If we haven’t said the words out loud, gauged others’ reactions, practiced reading body language and gained confidence in ourselves and our abilities?

I know. See? Duh. But to me I had always envisioned that we were striving towards creating environments where these lessons weren’t necessary. Perhaps that’s still my dream but this seems like quite the practical way to get closer to that, especially when combined with that modeling, integrated approach I like so much. Using both approaches at the same time suddenly seems like a great idea to me. Hmmmm…

I had the privilege of spending almost four hours with Dr. Sam Goldstein yesterday afternoon. He’s an Assistant Clinical Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah School of Medicine and an Affiliate Research Professor of Psychology at George Mason University. He’s an incredible researcher and a wonderful speaker. Topics, if you’re not familiar with his work, include: neuropsychology, ADHD, autism, intelligence and, amazingly, almost all his work pertains to ALL people, not just kids or people on the autism spectrum. Yesterday his official topic was ‘Raising, Educating and Nurturing Self-Discipline in Children’. What he actually covered was many times over what the title suggests. It included a discussion about genetic factors that drive children to learn and what we can do to nurture those, coupled with what we don’t do right now in that respect. The difference between intelligence and achievement. He discussed Instinctual Optimism and Intrinsic Motivation. Interestingly, his big question to all in the room was something along the lines of “How do we design schools to tap into all we know? If we could do it from the ground up, what would it look like?” His link is below:

www.samgoldstein.com

The other wonderful speaker I heard today was Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Assistant Professor of Education at the Rossier School of Education and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute. Many wonderful connections between neuroscience, brain research and emotions. Very cool! Also with the challenge that perhaps the way we are teaching children currently is nt allowing some processes that are neurologically beneficial to happen in the classroom. Cutting edge research! Here’s here website and link to publications:

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~immordin/

Posted here is a very interesting article about the country of Bhutan and ever-broadening world views of what constitutes success.

The article discusses, among other things, GNH or Gross National Happiness. Here in the US, it seems we often assume that with ’success’ will come happiness. I think most of us know that while some happiness is probably easier to experience when you’re not desperate for basic resources, many people who experience success of the type we typically value here in this capitalistic society are not happy at all. The question seems to me to be two-fold: What is our definition of success and can we make the concrete goal of happiness an attainable and desirable part of that?

While reading, I couldn’t help but think about why making happiness a highly valued goal is hard in a culture that doesn’t already make it a practice to put “soft” principles high on the priority list. Part of it is that here in the US we’ve evolved into a capitalistic culture of a certain type that places very specific social judgments on placing the importance of things like happiness as highly as other goals -things such as financial stability or academic  prestige. However, some of it is also our resistance to change. Even if we see that happiness is an important goal that pairs up nicely with our other interests, we still have to practice articulating that, telling others that we believe that happiness is imperative for our new definition of success. What is the driver for change and what provides the momentum to follow through? To change our feelings about success and what constitutes success on a societal level requires examining our entire sense of relative values. Difficult to do as a big group. However, if we do it individually and talk about it and share it with others, it becomes viral or infectious. (Funny I’m so interested in language and both those words have such specific connotations. Going to use them anyway…another topic for another day!)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-conley/what-business-leaders-can_b_446241.html

Really is a great article…enjoy!

Today in the NY Times there’s an article about Obama’s proposed changes to the evaluation of success in schools. Without a  doubt, this is either at the heart of current problems in the educational system or a big symptom of the problems. How do we measure success for our students? I would argue that it goes much deeper than that question on it’s own. How do we measure the success of our teachers (and I don’t mean just in how they teach children in the classroom but in a broader way for the profession)? How do we know learning is actually occurring in the classroom? How do we track data other than test scores? Is success measurable outside the walls of a classroom?

For the first time in a long time in the mainstream media an article focuses on a different definition of academic skills and what the reality of that would look like in an elementary classroom. It describes real ways that children would fill their time and describes the real-world benefits of those activities. This is one step of many towards a plan of action, not a theoretical model.

I am encouraged and fascinated. This is, in my opinion, the kind of discussion we need to be having about our schools and our goals for our education system as a whole.

Anyway, take a look below. Thanks for the link, Kate!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html?em

MSNBC has a news article about institutionalizing the use of the phrase ‘at hope’ kids instead of ‘at risk’ kids using the legislative system. It’s an interesting idea and one that fascinates me very much. Language is so very powerful, often in ways we aren’t thinking about when we use it. Even when we decide to pay attention to our word choices it’s often difficult to be consistent. In addition, there are countless disciplines in the areas of science, social science, law and many others where specialized language is required. Or at least it is thought to be required. And sometimes it’s misused or used to disenfranchise others without the same knowledge base or education level. What about parents of a seriously ill child who become experts in complex medical terminology in order to be able to understand the situation their child is in and to track their progress in ways quite similar to their doctors?

In this case, perception is the issue. Using the phrase ‘at risk’ to describe a group of children lacking in basic resources for life has, for some, gone from a helpful tool used for change and to create urgency to a label that inadvertently blocks change and growth.

The arguments against the official change in wording are equally interesting and both sides are undoubtedly complicated by politics and economics. Overall this reminds me how central language is in our daily work and how important it is to be mindful and thoughtful about our choices. I think it’s also important not to be afraid to reevaluate language as we have done in many circumstances throughout history to make sure the current accepted norms continue to be the most relevant word choices to impart the meaning we desire.

Here’s the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34826655/ns/us_news-life/

I was recently thinking about love and how I believe it’s one of the easiest emotions to share with others. And not just that but when you do share it, the benefits that come back to you (and hopefully others!) are significant. A few weeks ago the January 2010 edition of Scientific American Mind came out and had a whole article on what makes love between two people successful. Surprisingly, a lot of the work was done using students and relative strangers. The increase in feelings of love, even between total strangers, was incredible when they used certain techniques. One exercise in particular involved sharing a piece of personal information with another person. It’s a form of love to share and be listened to. Of course, there are many definitions of what love actually is and this leads to interesting thoughts and discussions about this type of research. Perhaps this isn’t love at all but something else? The link to the preview of the article is below. Take a look!

http://tinyurl.com/yeumxfo

So, I know you’ve probably heard it everywhere in the last few days. I have too. What will we do differently this year?

Now, I’m not usually one for New Years resolutions, mostly because I feel like I make changes in my life when they’re necessary and it doesn’t generally correspond with a tidy date. However, waking up today on the 2nd of January and realizing there’s something I desperately want to accomplish gave me the idea of using the new year to actually further a plan for change this year. A plan to tackle one big, nasty, persistent problem in my life that I have just not handled effectively yet. Today I thought, “What if I could wake up a year from now and be able to say that for 364 days I had done this thing well?” Wow, I really liked that idea!  I needed a strategy for making change that was based on me, my patterns and my ‘operating system.’ And, for once, I liked the idea of attaching a number to it.

So, here’s to day 1 – January 2nd, 2010! What will inspire you to make changes this year? How well do you know yourself and use that knowledge to choose change strategies that will work for YOU? How much more effective can we be when we use our knowledge about ourselves to tailor our plans and when we’re not afraid to do things in a way that we know feels right to us? We’ll see how it goes for me. I’ll report back in a year, give or take a day…

Blame. Why do we do it? Is blame a necessary component of group interaction? What’s the real difference between blame and accountability? How do we foster one and not the other?

If blame is contagious, could accountability be contagious too? Wouldn’t that be useful?

Below is a link to an article about a new study from USC Marshall School of Business and Stanford University about the root of why we blame and what the outcomes often are. One of the most compelling sections centers on the cascading effect of watching blame happen in a public way.

http://uscnews.usc.edu/business/people_like_to_play_the_blame_game.html

What do you think about blame? The study centers on workplaces but would all the same principles apply in a family? In a school? In a community?